Skip to main content

India and Rodomontade

My village: the rodomontade is on the way

Tapioca was a staple food in Kerala as potato was in Ireland.  It went out of fashion when the Malayali learnt not to trust politicians and decided to make his fortune outside the country.  The public school-educated young generation in Kerala today doesn’t appreciate the pristine tang of tapioca.  My grocer in the village sells a few kilograms of the starchy root every day and I am one of the frequent buyers. 

“The price has gone down very much but I am selling it at ₹20 a kg,” he told me as he was weighing one kg for me.  I was silent.  I usually don’t talk much except in the classroom.  “I can buy it for ₹7 a kg from the farmer.  But the poor man won’t even get his transporting charge let alone the cost of cultivating it.  So I bought it for ₹15 a kg.”

“You did the right thing,” I said.  “It’s a pity that the farmers have been reduced to this situation,” I added to myself.

“Shashi Tharoor’s latest contribution to the Indian cacophony is apt,” I said to my wife as we were back in our car having purchased all the grocery we needed.

“Rodomontade!” Maggie repeated Tharoor’s new addition to the nation’s upper class entertainment. 

“Isn’t that what the nation is today?” I asked.  “Just boastful, inflated talk and deeds learnt from a man who rodomontaded silly things like his 56 inch chest.  Where’s all the development he promised?  Instead we have hatred and violence.  And a whole lot of rodomontade about some millennia old civilisation …”

“Sir, give me something, a little help,” a handicapped man stood outside the car.  I had just strapped the seat belt and started the engine.

He was a handicapped man who used to smile at me every time I entered the grocery shop.  He used to stand at the entrance doing nothing but smile at people.  I gave him ₹20. 

“What will I get with this?” he asked.

“One kg of tapioca,” I said as I shifted the gear.

“Jesus will bless you.”  I heard the man’s blessing though an old Malayalam film song had automatically started on the music system of the car.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...
8 comments
Read more

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...
22 comments
Read more

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...
8 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more